Tread But Lightly In These Cruel Shoes
by LilacFree
Summary: Set during the Fifth Doctor's episode 'Castrovalva' and looks at the start of Tegan and Nyssa's friendship.


Set during the Fifth Doctor's episode 'Castrovalva', this looks at the start of Tegan and Nyssa's friendship. While none of the dialogue comes from the episode, this could be looked on as a missing scene. I did my best to be sure it contradicts nothing in canon.

I don't own Doctor Who, but I have two cats. Go me!

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Tread But Lightly (In These Cruel Shoes)

Once upon a time, on a planet named Castrovalva, two young women undertook a quest. They were from different stars, and had little in common beside their gender. Their companion, a magus known as the Doctor, had been stolen from their care while suffering the malady of having tricked Death himself. Their boy companion was Death's prisoner still. The Doctor had been taken into the hold high above. Tegan and Nyssa could find no other way to him but to climb, no matter how arduous.

Halfway up they paused clinging to the rock. Above them the cliffs of Castrovalva seemed to swell outwards: an optical illusion but a daunting one.

Nyssa was staring at Tegan's shoes.

"Let me guess—you're wondering how I can climb in these? Sheer bad temper. It carries me a long way."

"Well, yes. But Tegan, you do not seem so ill tempered to me. You are passionate, not cruel." Nyssa's limpid gaze held Tegan's.

"Thanks. You—you're a trouper, you are. Brave. Steadfast, that's it."

Halfway up a cliff was an odd place for an Australian stewardess and a Traken princess to become friends, but it worked for them. They smiled at each other in the camaraderie of adversities overcome.

Event One: dealt with. Flying the TARDIS? A piece of cake. Toting a Time Lord in a box? No problem.

The cliff didn't stand a chance.

When heroines such as these needed some down time, Castrovalva's Dwellings of Simplicity were exactly as advertised. Here was a simple room, containing the simplest of amenities. They observed modesty without speaking of it, turning away as they undressed and washed and drew on the night clothes lent them.

Tegan tried the bed. It was simple. Too simple. She was tired enough to sleep on a box of rocks, but that didn't mean she had to let it pass uncommented. "It feels like a novice's bed in a convent."

"You have been a member of a spiritual order?" Nyssa's voice attempted to politely conceal incredulity.

"No, but you guessed that." Tegan grinned. "I'm not cut out for a nunnery. How about you?"

Nyssa sat down on the edge of the other bed. "The purification of the spirit is an important… was an important… discipline on Traken. She folded her delicate hands in her lap. "Traken is gone. It fell, with many other worlds, to the Master's folly."

Tegan's jaw dropped. She started to say, I you poor thing /I , but before she drew breath she was struck by the tremendous inadequacy of any words she possessed to comfort the loss of a planet.

"He killed my aunt. This morning, while I was lost in the TARDIS. The Doctor told me." If deaths were reckoned by weight, an aunt seemed little in comparison to a whole world. All Tegan could offer in truth was shared pain.

"He stole my father's body for his own. He took everything else I had wearing my father's face like a costume."

They sat facing each other. Nyssa's face was impossibly composed. Tegan thought it was probably shock. Their words hung in the air like thunderheads.

There should have been a storm, but one could drain the ocean and not have enough salt tears to wash away such pain. "I'm sorry. I wish I knew what to say," Tegan said awkwardly. She couldn't stand the silence any more.

"My pain does not make yours less, Tegan. You have as much right to grief."

Nyssa was just a kid. Tegan didn't know enough profanity to curse the man who'd orphaned her so entirely. She stood up and paced back and forth. The window drew her attention and she looked out over the peaceful span of Castrovalva's square. It was not yet very late and a few lights shone in windows. "It's like a fairy tale out there. I feel like I've been stuck in one since I walked into the TARDIS. The Master… he's a proper fairy tale villain all in black, isn't he?"

"A fairy tale—that is a kind of folk myth, yes? Where virtue is rewarded and evil defeated. Traken had such tales. We seem to have missed the happy ending."

"It's not ended yet." Tegan went back to her bed.

"Tell me one of your fairy tales, please, Tegan? I am too restless to sleep." The dignified pleading in Nyssa's voice made Tegan want to break things, preferably the Master's neck.

"I guess I can. You can't grow up without hearing them over and over again." Tegan nibbled on her lower lip. "Once upon a time—that's the way they start, Nyssa—once upon a time, there was a girl whose mother died. Her father remarried a woman who had two daughters of her own. He thought this woman would be a good mother to his own daughter, but as he often traveled, he never knew that his new wife was cruel. She made her stepdaughter do all the housework. The girl had to sleep by the hearth of the kitchen fire for warmth and her stepsisters called her Cinderella to make fun of her."

Tegan was glad for this task. It kept her spirits up, and Nyssa was an encouraging audience. Explaining a fairy godmother to someone from another planet took some ingenuity, but Nyssa managed to understand Tegan's inexpert unfolding of human literature. There was one point she stuck on, however.

"Glass slippers? That sounds painful."

"They were magic. But you know, I read once that it might have been a translation error and they were really fur slippers, but glass sounds more magical to me."

The words came up from Tegan's memory easily now. She thought about doing a little editing on the fly, but Tegan was fond on the story the way she knew it best. She had grown up with a fairly gruesome version that did not scant the paring of the heel or the cut off toe, or the fate of the villains of the piece. "And they made the stepmother and her daughters put on red hot iron shoes and dance until they fell down dead."

"And Cinderella?"

"Lived happily ever after, of course. Not that the Prince sounded like much of a bargain to me. She'd have to worry about every woman with the same shoe size."

"This tale is told to children? With all that torment?" Nyssa looked horrified.

"They keep changing the stories to make them less scary. You seldom find it told that way now. I suppose it's better for children, but… it seems more true, with all the cruelty in it."

"Your world sounds like a harsh place, Tegan. Though I liked the green spaces. I noticed they left much to nature around the Pharos Project."

"Nature's cruel, Nyss'. Australia, where I was raised, is full of poisonous animals and widowmaker trees and crocodiles. And in the seas there are man-eating sharks, and jellyfish with stings so painful people kill themselves before they die of the venom. And you know what? I love it there. It would be dull without the danger."

"We tamed Traken and only feared what might come from beyond our skies. We trusted in the Source to protect us. Shall I tell you a story? It, too, has a wicked stepmother."

"Go on, then." Tegan stretched out on the bed.

"Once upon a time, there was a daughter who loved her father, and was loved by him, for they only had each other after her mother died. But in time, men being what they are, he felt love in his heart for a beautiful young woman and brought her home to be his daughter's new mother. This woman meant to be kind, and treat the daughter as her own, but she brought ruin as her dowry.

"An evil creature had found its way to Traken soil, but the power of the Source petrified it. Like a statue, the Melkur stood in a lovely garden, that the light of the Source might shine upon it and penetrate its core until all its evil had been washed away.

"It had been appointed the woman, when she was a girl, to bring offerings of flowers and loving words to the Melkur, to speed the healing of its wounded soul. It is the task of those who are approaching maturity to perform these offerings, to help them practice compassion. Kassia, for that was her name, showed great devotion to this task. A Melkur is expected to crumble and be absorbed into the innocent soil of Traken, but this particular Melkur endured. Kassia vowed that she would never cease her attendance until the Melkur was healed.

"Yet now that she was wed, the Keeper commanded that she at last give up the task to her stepdaughter. The stepdaughter thought that Kassia was very kind and was glad to know her father was so well loved. She took up the duty gladly.

"Kassia did love her husband. She loved him too well. The Keeper of the Source was dying, and he appointed Kassia's husband his successor. When Kassia realized she would be parted from the man she loved, she was wracked with grief. She could not bring herself to beg her husband to refuse the greatest honor accorded any Traken citizen, for he deserved it.

"She poured out her grief to the Melkur and it spoke to her. It promised her that it would contrive her husband would never be Keeper if she but obeyed its will." Nyssa's clear grey eyes grew steely. "In her selfish grief, she acceded. She served evil and caused much destruction, and finally her own death—but she had her wish. Her husband was never Keeper. The Melkur had wished to usurp that power itself."

Nyssa fell silent. She had not once raised her voice, but her silence filled the room with anger. Tegan was sure that Nyssa's story was no fiction. "They say you should be careful what you wish for," she said at last.

"Oh. I wished…" Nyssa put a hand to her mouth, for the first time she seemed ready to weep. "Adric told me of his life in the TARDIS. I wanted that. I wished I could travel with Adric and the Doctor. Now I have my wish, too. Oh, father!"

Nyssa slid down to the floor and wept. Tegan joined her, holding her as they wept together. They had but each other this night, and the tears of a girl from Traken seemed no different from those of a girl from Earth.

Not far away, a wolf in a sheep's white fleece clothing surveyed a unique tapestry. Its warp and weft displayed two young women that only the most bizarre of fates could have ever made friends. By his arts, this blackest of villains had contrived that his tapestry show aught he desired. It was not designed to convey sound, yet he distinctly heard weeping.

If Tegan had not preferred Grimm and Perrault to Andersen, she might have told a different tale. Her home lay waiting beyond the fairy stories, but Nyssa would never return to Traken, lost forever.

There was once a princess of a land under the sea, the most peaceful realm of all. But she wished that she could trade the tail of a mermaid for two feet and go walking on land. She got her wish. She learned to live without the land beneath the sea, but at a price. For every step she took in this new world felt as though she trod on invisible knives.

The End


End file.
